Read the FA. THe summary doesn't explain exactly what is happening. EO 12333 originally allowed for collection of data abroad, but today, the collection happens in the USA -- in domestic Internet hubs. Naturally, the vast majority of the data scooped up this way is purely domestic and concerns US citizens, but the NSA claims that this is purely incidental. That's right -- the majority of the collection is "incidental". Yeah, right.

FISA? That rubber stamp is bypassed while collecting masses of data on US citizens.

"This program was started at least back in 2001 and has expanded to between 80 and 100 tap points on the fiber optic lines in the lower 48 states," he said by e-mail. "Most of these fiber optic tap points are not on the East or West coast. This means that the primary target of this collection is domestic... Most collection of US domestic communications and data is done under EO 12333, section 2.3 paragraph C in the Upstream program. They claim, near as I can tell, that all domestic collection is incidental. That's, of course, the vast majority of data."

We play 5-6 player Catan all the time and don't find the extra build phase slows anything down at all.

When the dice are passed to the next player, anybody who wants to build something just says "Buying X at the end of your turn" and that's that. In the extremely rare case of a conflict, you just resolve the builds clockwise from the current player. There's no need to stop and ask each player in turn "are you building anything?", which is the only way I can imagine it "bogging things down".

If anything, it speeds things up considerably (you can get new towns/cities out that much faster which immediately improves your income position, and it really cuts down on people needing to discard half their hand on a 7).

We have a house rule where anybody that starts bitching about something ("you blocked my road!", "my numbers never come up!", etc) has to immediately take a shot.

It's a GREAT rule.

Good point. I forgot that so much was built before the kingdom was so large.

Out of curiosity, why do you call it an "ADD comment"?

Attention deficit disorder - as in rushing in to post something without reading beyond the first sentence, as hilariously revealed above when you showed you'd entirely missed the "benefit of the doubt" in the second sentence.

I think you really need imaginary foes to fight against to make yourself feel important

That fits your ridiculous behaviour of jumping on my comment without even reading beyond the first few words to deliver some sort of lecture. I suggest you let it go instead of indulging in such petty bullying in the hope that I have a low enough self esteem for such a comment to gain traction.

So let's have a bit of truth from you now - why did you jump in too swiftly to even read my comment when I was being critical of a luddite rolling out an old and tired argument from the luddite's playbook?

why do you continue to engage me?

I found your "epic fail" above somewhat amusing and wish to know more about the clown who wrote it.

Riiiight, because it's better to leave it as is. The word of the police vs the word of the citizen. They are already surveilling us. Cameras on cops is a means to at least attempt to keep them honest and provide a record when abuses of power occur.

More than a decade ago, when they abandoned desktop and regular users and only focused on enterprise, they made their biggest mistake. Where do you think Ubuntu Server users come from?

This.

Absolutely true. RedHat desktop was awful (in comparison to other distros) for a while. Unfortunately, it's going that way again (Gnome 3). I only hope that someone will create a MATE repository for RHEL/CentOS 7.

What this implies is that the execs at RedHat don't eat their own dogfood, which is terrible for any software company. They should run RHEL on their personal desktops/laptops, etc..

After Citizens United, they can fund Super PACs.

Incorrect. You could have at least tried to check Wikipedia before posting ignorant comments. This is directly from their page (check the link if you want source references).

Pot, kettle, much? I specifically referenced Super PACs. From that very page:

Super PACs[edit]
Super PACs, officially known as "independent-expenditure only committees," may not make contributions to candidate campaigns or parties, but may engage in unlimited political spending independently of the campaigns. Unlike traditional PACs, they can raise funds from individuals, corporations, unions, and other groups without any legal limit on donation size.[19]

it's only a bad idea if the police have control over the recordings ... then you would see incriminating footage getting lost or deleted (and blamed on "equipment failure" )

Even if the police have control, after some time, ordinary people would see a pattern: "no recording == suspicious behaviour by the police". Then, turning off the camera isn't going to provide much protection to a police officer.

Corporations can create PACs, but cannot contribute to them.

After Citizens United, they can fund Super PACs.

They can (after the SCOTUS decision) fund media information about candidates but cannot endorse for or against any candidates

In other words, corporations can put unlimited money towards echoing a candidate's talking points, as long as they don't coordinate with with candidate. However, as Stephen Colbert [I think] pointed out, Super PACs can apparently have an office next door to a candidate, have staff who work for both, but still not be coordinating with that candidate.

As far as I can tell, the banned activities are:
Give money either directly or indirectly (via a PAC) to a candidate.
Directly endorse/oppose a candidate

But, as I have pointed out above, they can use their own money to promote the same message as a candidate.

When I subscribed to Comcast a while back, there was a 4 day outage. By the second day, I found out that it was due to an attack on the DNS servers.

Comcast runs DNS servers? Wow, perhaps I did not need to run my own for all these years! On the other hand, I have not had any problems at my home LAN due to DNS going down.

That's exactly what I said, but in different language.

Umm, no, it isn't. You quoted a statement that companies are banned from "spending money to influence federal elections.", whereas the quote I provided shows that companies can spend money on "electioneering communications", which I think includes spending money to influence federal elections.

I just didn't visit this site for a few days and then found your ridiculous ADD comment with condescending advice and I felt it was ridiculous enough to reply to. It may not satisfy your ego but that's the very simple reality.

I think that you missed the note at the beginning of that page:

Note: Portions of this publication may be affected by the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC. Essentially, the Court's ruling permits corporations and labor organizations to use treasury funds to make independent expenditures in connection with federal elections and to fund electioneering communications.

How about a sphere due to wrapping it all up in string :)

For all those "that just might work" people it would be a bit of a bastard of a job wrapping under the blocks even with enough rope.